Walmart-backed PhonePe is raising its IPO as global tensions rattle markets

PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing geopolitical tensions and a volatile stock market.

The Bengaluru-based company said on Monday that it has paused its IPO plans, but remains committed to going public once market conditions improve. This move comes less than two months after the financial technology company submitted an updated prospectus, targeting a listing on Indian stock exchanges later this year.

Rising tensions in the Middle East have rocked global financial markets and pushed oil prices higher, prompting investors to pull back from stock markets. India’s two benchmark stock indices, the Nifty 50 and the BSE Sensex, have both fallen by about 9% over the past month, and hundreds of Indian stocks have recorded declines of more than 10% since the conflict began on February 28.

PhonePe, which was valued at about $12 billion in January 2023, was targeting a market value of about $15 billion in its IPO, which could have raised as much as $1.5 billion.

Recently, however, investment bankers working with PhonePe on its IPO suggested lowering its valuation expectations to about $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.

PhonePe said any claims that the IPO had been paused due to valuation concerns were “unfounded.”

“We have only paused the operation due to current market conditions, which are unrelated to PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

PhonePe’s IPO was expected to provide a way out for many early investors. According to its IPO filing, Tiger Global and Microsoft were scheduled to sell their entire stakes, and majority owner Walmart plans to offload up to 45.9 million shares, or about 9% of the company, while retaining control.

Founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe was acquired by e-commerce giant Flipkart a year later and has since grown to become India’s largest digital payments platform. The company leads the Indian government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem in terms of transaction volume, beating Google Pay.

In February 2026, PhonePe processed about 9.3 billion transactions worth approximately INR 13.1 trillion (about US$141.9 billion), compared to Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth about INR 9 trillion (about US$97.8 billion), according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Flipkart spun off PhonePe into a separate company in 2022, though Walmart remained the fintech’s largest shareholder. The company started as a digital payments platform but has since expanded into financial services, offering stock and mutual fund investments, as well as an Android app store positioned as an alternative to the Google Play Store.

In the six months ending September 2025, PhonePe’s revenue from operations rose 22% to 39.19 billion rupees (about $424.4 million) from a year earlier, according to its prospectus. The company’s loss widened to ₹14.44 billion (about $156.4 million) from ₹12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) in the previous year, as it continued spending on expanding its services.